KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 207 



explored the Missouri-Columbia route; but years be 

 fore the Louisiana purchase, free trappers were already 

 on the Columbia. David Thompson of the North- West 

 Company was the first Canadian to explore the lower 

 Columbia; but before Thompson had crossed the Rock 

 ies, French hunters were already ranging the forests 

 of the Pacific slope. How did these coasters of the 

 wilds guide themselves over prairies that were a chart- 

 less sea and mountains that were a wilderness? How 

 does the wavey know where to find the rush-grown in 

 land pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek re 

 fuge on islands where the water will cut off the wolves 

 that would prey on her young? 



Something, which may be the result of generations 

 of accumulated observation, guides the wavey and the 

 caribou. Something, which may be the result of un 

 conscious inference from a life-time of observation, 

 guides the man. In the animal we call it instinct, in 

 the man, reason; and in the case of the trapper track 

 ing pathless wilds, the conscious reason of the man 

 seems almost merged in the automatic instinct of the 

 brute. It is not sharp-sightedness though no man 

 is sharper of sight than the trapper. It is not acute- 

 ness of hearing though the trapper learns to listen 

 with the noiseless stealth of the pencil-eared lynx. It 

 is not touch in the sense of tactile contact any more 

 than it is touch that tells a suddenly awakened sleeper 

 of an unexpected noiseless presence in a dark room. 

 It is something deeper than the tabulated five senses, 

 a sixth sense a sense of feel, without contact a sense 

 on which the whole sensate world writes its records as 

 on a palimpsest. This palimpsest is the trapper s chart, 

 this sense of feel, his weapon against the instinct of the 



